Alan Fraser: The Review Snookered by the red, or should that be the brown?

It is all very well for the BBC to urge viewers to 'press the red button' but what if they are colour blind?

Like, for example, a young man from Northern Ireland called Mark Allen. The same Allen, as it happens, who on Saturday knocked Ronnie O'Sullivan out of the World Snooker Championship and terminated interest in the event in thousands of homes around the country.

Eye on the balls: Mark Allen requires a bit of help from the referee during his match against Ronnie O'Sullivan.

'Is that the brown?' Allen asked of the referee, while pointing tentatively at a brown ball hiding in a cluster of reds. Allen was clearly uncertain.

This called for investigation. Surely, a colour blind snooker player is a bit like the jockey who is allergic to horses or the diver who suffers from vertigo. Daft as they all sound, examples do exist. The late David 'The Duke' Nicholson, leading jockey and champion trainer, fought a lifetime allergy to horses; Mathew Helm, an Australian diver, overcame vertigo to compete in the Olympic Games in Beijing.

Four of the 32 competitors who started out at The Crucible earlier this month suffer from colour blindness - Allen, Peter Ebdon, twice world champion Mark Williams and Stephen Lee. A crazy freak of statistics, you might think. That is what I thought. You would be wrong. I was. The condition affects upwards of eight per cent of the male population.

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Still, the mind boggles at the thought of youngsters struggling with colours and taking up a career requiring them to differentiate between red, yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black on a daily basis. The problem balls for all four are the red and brown. Just as well there is no brown button on the TV remote.

Interactive TV has become the place to watch live snooker, or indeed most live sport. Allen knocked out O'Sullivan behind the red button on Saturday morning. Stephen Hendry's defeat of Ding Junhui had hitherto been regarded as the match of the tournament. That, too, happened behind the red button.

Which is all very well until it comes to, for example, the traditional Saturday afternoon slot on BBC1. How many snooker fans sat down then to watch a couple of hours of live action only to be fobbed off with a regurgitation of what had already happened?

A package of the O'Sullivan match, completed hours earlier, was followed by highlights from the Hendry match. That ended on Friday night, for goodness sake.

Throw in some nonsense - like footballers being asked about their favourite snooker celebrations - and it left only the final 20 minutes for snooker. Oh, for the days of Grandstand and afternoons of live sport.